Monday, March 23, 2015

China Is Near

Marco Bellocchio’s China Is Near (1967) which is currently being revived at Film Forum hearkens back to a time when
sex wasn’t so much political, as it has become today, as an allegory for politics. The film is
reminiscent of Renoir’s La regle du jeu (1939) to the extent that the satire resonates
the class conflict which is the movie’s underlying theme. Vittorio (Glauco
Mauri) and his sister Elena (Elda Tattoli) are two aristocrats who get tricked into
marrying the help, in the form of their two bookkeerpers Carlo (Paolo Graziosi)
and Giovanna (Daniela Surina). Vittorio, who's running for political office, is as promiscuous politically as his sister Elena is in bed and
it’s his 17 year old younger brother Camillo (Pierluigi Apra), from whom the
movie’s titled derives, who flirts with Maoism. The first scene of China Is
Near sets the tone in a particularly ingenious way. Camillo is organizing a
gang bang, but while it would be fun to employ the sex as an attack on the
bourgeoisie, he’s decided that only a working class girl will allow herself to
be in an ecstatic state where she no longer notices where one lover’s
ministrations begin and another's ends. Everything in China’s Is Near, including
a bomb that fails to do much damage at Socialist Party headquarters, to two out of of wedlock
pregnancies, fails to have dire consequences. In fact rich and poor walk off
into the sunset with the musical beds leading to a paradigm of a classless
society. In this sense the ending of the movie is a little like Macheath being
freed from the gallows at the end of The Threepenny Opera. The dark underside,
along with the social critique come in the self-conscious improbability of the denouement.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.